My basic premise is that slavery was never positively condemned in America because Union required compromise. And thus, the end of slavery was never completely accepted by the American south and those feelings of resentment on losing their rights to keep black slaves has led to present day racism.
Only a complete and honest discussion will lead to some resolution of the problem, or at least be able to provide some direction on where America needs to go from here on in.
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Though the American Civil War was fought for economic reasons (the North couldn't compete with the South's slave labor), the North's marketing and recruitment was "God hates slavery!"
Thus the more than 600,000 Union soldiers who died in the war participated to "end the slavery that God hates" .. and that's a pretty big condemnation of slavery in the minds of the people.
So I don't think there's any question -- clearly slavery was positively condemned.
It doesn't matter, though, that slavery was clearly positively condemned, as the South, who lost the war, at a cost of nearly a million confederate soldiers' lives, was not psychologically able to accept that condemnation which meant they'd be on the emotional hook for the roughly two million people killed in the war, beyond the psychological tolerance level of most.
To even hold slaves requires a suspending of acceptance of reality associated with morality. Thus slaveholders were psychologically forced to think of slaves as anything from an inferior breed of human to a form of animal. Thus the slaver holder's "superiority" justified the holding, working, and caring for these "inferior" beings, an attitude a war and condemnation couldn't psychologically defeat.
Thus after the war the slave holders were now forced to live and work alongside of former slaves
as equals, which conflicted with the former slaveholders' attitude of being superior, an understandably psychologically unshakable attitude, that no amount or type of "education" could ever expect to remedy.
Also, since nearly all slaves had been of African descent, their race was an obvious visual difference between them and their former slaveholders, and these former slaves comparative lack of intelligence, on average, was reflected in their behavior that was also different from that of former slaveholders.
So though some of the racist behaviors changed with the abolition of slavery, racist attitudes in the South remained, and understandably so. Without adequate psychotherapy for every Southerner, they were left with denial and anger as their most often blocked stages of associated loss grief, never quite making it to bargaining, depression, and acceptance for what would be many generations.
Once the denial and anger blocks occurred, they became reflected in the Southern culture, which in turn became a form of "education curriculum" in Southern society that kept racism cemented into their culture.
With each generation, though, more and more Southerners broke through to the bargaining, depression, and acceptance stages of Southern grief .. and they, in turn, spared their children from it .. which ended racism for them.
But many people still passed the denial and anger block to their kids, kids who couldn't move on from their parents' racism because the culture of "obey your parents with Southern respect" kept them at the same blocked stage.
Indeed, I know some Americans who had to overcome this blockage. One person's Southern grandfather was born in the late 1860s, his dad was born a bit after the turn of the century, and he was born half way through the 20th century. He's told me that his dad was still very racist, even in the 1960s, and that he had to work psychologically within his own mind to overcome his dad's legacy racism, which kept his own kids and grandkids from being racist.
My point is that overcoming Southern racism isn't merely an education task, it's mostly, maybe predominantly, a psychotherapy task, as that degree of deep recovery is necessary to break generational links and overcome many decades of Southern denial and anger that has been part of their culture.
But with each recent generation, however, greater strides have been made by individual Southerners to shed their psychological legacy of slavery and racism.
Today, most Southerns are simply not racist in this regard.
The small percentage who are racist continues to dwindle as I just presented. But until then, no amount of education can dispel an attitude that is steeped in their family's or their local culture's blocked denial and anger.
They need self-help or professional psychotherapy, and only psychotherapy will make the necessary individual difference.
